A Silver Willow by the Shore Read online

  “A flower - shriveled, bare of fragrance,

  Forgotten on a page - I see,

  And instantly my soul awakens,

  Filled with an aimless reverie”

  His voice is honey, the harsh syllables of their native language soft and gentle coming from his mouth. He speaks the words of Pushkin into Elizaveta’s suffocating discomposure, and it becomes an instant balm. Nina watches as her mother slowly lowers her hands and looks at his face, the dark of her eyes shrinking back with her receding terror. Viktor gently touches her hand, and when she doesn’t pull away he slides his hand up to encircle her frail wrist, measuring her pulse as he continues to speak quietly, the poem falling from his lips in a calming cadence.

  He stops and offers Elizaveta a soft smile. She covers his hands with her own and peers intently into his eyes.

  “Dima?” she whispers. “Dima, is it you?”

  Nina puts her hand over her mouth and blinks hard at the sight of her mother so disoriented. Viktor remains calm.

  “No, Elizaveta Andreyevna,” he replies, calling her by her formal name as their shared culture demands. “I’m Dr. Shevchenko.”

  She blinks twice, then drops his hands. Her confusion thickens, and Nina takes in long, slow breaths.

  “Do you know where you are?” Viktor asks.

  Elizaveta purses her lips and nods once. Nina squats down next to Viktor and grabs her mother’s hand.

  “Mama, let’s go inside with Dr. Shevchenko and let him have a look at you, okay?”

  Elizaveta pulls her hand away, her jaw set in the usual line of stubbornness. “Yes, khorosho,” she murmurs. “Fine. But I don’t need to be coddled like a child.”

  Nina knows immediately that her mother is back, and she exhales deeply, the knot in her stomach hardening as she processes all that transpired.

  “Of course you don’t,” she replies. She steps back and lets Viktor help her mother to a stand. It’s clear that he is the better person to handle this moment.

  “Elizaveta Andreyevna, would you like Nina to come with us into the exam room, or should she wait out here?” he asks. Nina’s eyes snap to his face, hurt welling up in her chest at his suggestion.

  “She will wait here,” Elizaveta answers, the relief in her voice palpable. Nina nods and stands frozen as Viktor guides her mother toward the front door of his office. He glances back at her over Elizaveta’s silver-grey hair and offers an apologetic smile. She watches until they’re safely inside and she’s certain she can no longer be seen. Then she leans forward on the front of her car and puts her head in her hands.

  “Don’t cry,” she whispers. “Ne plach.” She blinks back the tears that threaten to fight to the surface. She can hear her mother’s voice in her head from when she was a child.

  “Russian women are too strong for crying, Ninochka,” her mother would say when Nina came home teary-eyed over a skinned knee or hurt feelings. “We are above all the tears.”

  Nina had long since learned to stifle emotion, to hold it at bay out of sheer determination, and today wouldn’t be any different. She stands back up and draws in a deep breath, then turns and walks slowly to the pharmacy next door to the clinic.

  “I won’t cry, but I can smoke,” she mutters, pulling open the door and stepping into the refreshingly cool building.

  Elizaveta

  There is no room for individuality in a truly great society.

  I saw him so clearly. His face materialized before me soft and young, and I could reach for him, but I could not touch him. My hand flitted through the air, and I caught only a memory.

  The doctor asks me questions, but I can’t quite seem to make out all that he’s saying. His words move in and out of the room like flies at a picnic. They are a distraction, and so I ignore them. I think only of Dima.

  We were young, huddled together in the bare, wooden schoolroom at the internment camp outside the gulag. We knew Papa was somewhere inside the camp, but we hadn’t been permitted to see him. Every day before school, Dima and I walked along the line of the fence that separated us from the real prisoners and stared at the faces of those on the other side, hoping for some glimpse of Papa. We saw men and women walking around, all wearing the same brown prison uniform on their bodies and a haunted look on their faces. No one moved quickly behind that wooden fence topped with barbed metal that twisted and curled its way around the perimeter like a wretched sneer. We pressed our faces against the wood, hoping for some sign that he was really in there, but we never saw him. I didn’t even know who to look for, but Dima did, and he insisted that he saw nothing.

  I remember how icy cold my hands were, and even now I feel the urge to ball them tight into a fist, nails digging into flesh, hoping to stave off the cold that pierces through flesh and muscle and settles tight inside the bones. It was Dima, my protective older brother, who always grabbed my hands and rubbed them between his own, hoping that the friction between his thick hands would heat up my thin, frail fingers.

  We arrived at the small building that housed the schoolroom, and I still remember the feeling of relief when we stepped inside. It was warmer inside those walls, insulated somewhat from the raging winter by planks of wood that actually met, a thin, black line of some sort of sealant keeping the outside elements at bay and offering us a few short hours of freedom from the cold. We sat in our seats, and I scooted as close to Dima as I could. He never minded when I pressed up against him.

  The teacher walked into the room and greeted us in her taut, high-pitched voice, the nasal tone so grating that even now I feel it run down my spine. She stood before us, her pudgy hands clasped in front of her pouch of a stomach. Her crisp, brown jacket was buttoned tight over her abdomen, the buttons straining against her girth. The navy blue skirt hung nearly to her ankles, longer than on most of the other officers due to her oddly short legs. Her hair was always pulled into a severe bun at the nape of her neck, and her navy beret sat crooked on her head at such an uncomfortable angle I sometimes found myself tilting my head when she spoke to try and straighten it out in my mind. I could never quite decide how old Valerya Sergeyevna was. I didn’t know if she was quite old, or perhaps quite young and merely aged poorly. Either way, I found her to be the ugliest woman I had ever seen.

  “Good morning,” she said, her eyes scanning the room with obvious disdain.

  “Good morning, Valerya Sergeyevna,” we intoned. We were a room full of children, imprisoned and found guilty for being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. We were kulatskoye otrodye, the children of ‘kulaks’, and Valerya Sergeyevna reminded us every day just how offensive our very lives were to her. Even then, I sensed that she must have been under some terrible punishment to be forced to breathe the same air as us.

  “You are a disgrace to our society,” she said each morning before drilling us in the ways of the proper Soviet. “There is no room for individuality in a truly great society. The collective can only achieve greatness if we all acquiesce to the whole, together as one.”

  I didn’t know what acquiesce meant. Even now I struggle with its meaning. The word swims through my consciousness leaving only confusion and frustration in its wake.

  “You’re here because your families, your parents and grandparents, were violent enemies of socialism. They didn’t care about the collective whole. They were selfish, and that selfishness made them dangerous. They are the worst our society has to offer, and there is little hope for them. But you all can change your own destinies. You can redeem yourselves by simply renouncing your families. If you admit their harmful activities, and your guilt by association, then the future can change for you. Acquiesce to the greater good. Fall in line with our great nation. This will save you from the ugly and deserved path of your parents.”

  She said this, and her words were beginning to sink in. I found myself angry with my father for his individuality. I grew increasingly bitter toward my mother for her quiet stoicism and her whispered rebellion. She continued to read the dangerous
words at night—poetry and quoted scriptures—all of which were expressly forbidden, and as she spoke it seemed her words were lifted up by the howling wind and sent out over the camp, her rebellion floating over all of us like a blanket of guilt. She needed to...to acquiesce.

  All of our lessons in school reiterated just how terrible we were, how guilty by association, and the bitterness grew inside my childish chest, crackling like fire fizzling in the icy winds that seemed to never stop. But not Dima. He didn’t believe a word she said, and he muttered under his breath throughout each lesson. Sometimes he’d let out a defiant laugh only to be struck across the cheek and sent to stand in front of the class. Valerya Sergeyevna had no patience or time for rebellion, and she let Dima know by her refusal to look at him or speak to him. Their only communications were the repeated slaps she doled out, sometimes deserved, and sometimes just because she felt like it.

  There were days when I also received the brunt of Valerya Sergeyevna’s anger. On the days that Dima remained passive, unwilling to engage with her in debate, she elicited his rage by coming down on me. The worst was the day she caught me drawing. I didn’t even know I was doing it. She was speaking, and my hands just started moving over the page, the tiny stub of a pencil I’d been given working in thin strokes to create an image. When she slammed her hand on the table in front of me, I snapped my eyes to hers, then quickly shifted them back down to my paper. I had drawn a picture of a woman standing beneath a tree. The picture was crude, not perfectly drawn, but well done enough to see that the woman stood up straight, almost as if in defiance, her hands hanging by her side as if preparing to run. I had drawn the woman’s back, with no face to help me discern who she might have been, but somehow I felt that this was a woman that I knew, that perhaps had I been given the chance to finish the drawing she would have been recognizable to me.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Valerya Sergeyevna screeched, snatching the drawing from my hands. She crumpled it up into a ball and tossed it over her shoulder, then brought her hand down across my cheek with a vicious crack. Immediately my eyes filled with tears as I huddled down in my seat.

  Dima flew up out of his chair and stepped between the enraged teacher and me, his eyes flashing.

  “Don’t ever touch her again,” he hissed. Tall for his age, Dima stood eye to eye with the stout woman, her fleshy eyes blinking furiously over bright, red cheeks. She reached up and grabbed Dima by the ear, dragging him to the corner where she shoved his face into the wall.

  “You’ll stay there the rest of the day, you little worm. And if you don’t learn to shut up, I’ll have you and your sister sent to the other side of the fence where they know how to deal with trash like you.” Spittle flew from her fat lips. She turned back to the rest of the class, all of us stunned, too frightened to move. Smoothing her stiff jacket back into place, she took in a deep breath and instructed us to write our names 100 times followed by “is an unworthy kulak child.”

  That afternoon as we trudged home, the icy path crunching beneath our feet and bellies grumbling with no hope of satisfaction, I stole glances at Dima from the corner of my eye. His face was set in a hard stare, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his frayed pants. His hair had been shaved the day we arrived at the camp, and it was starting to grow out in tufts that sprouted up around his head. They had cut off my braids the day we arrived as well. Dima said my shorn hair made me look older, but I never really did believe him. I knew I must look as strange with my haircut as he looked with his.

  “What is it?” he finally asked me after I opened my mouth and snapped it shut for the tenth time.

  “Why do you make Valerya Sergeyevna so angry?” I asked softly.

  “Because she’s a liar,” he answered. I grabbed his elbow and stopped walking, peering up at him through the dim, grey sky. I blinked twice, trying to formulate the words in my young brain. Dima was my older brother, wise and protective. He was the one who tried to make me laugh when the days felt too long and brutal. When Mama dragged herself into the barracks after another long day of working, hauling trees and branches that the loggers brought in onto carts to be shipped away to the good Soviets, Dima was the one who massaged her hands and feet. When Tanya sobbed into her thin blanket at night, begging for food to fill her empty stomach, Dima sang songs into her little ear until the sobs softened, and she drifted into a fitful sleep. Dima was good. But the things he said were bad.

  “How is she a liar?” I asked. “She’s here to teach us to be better so that our country will like us again.”

  Dima snorted and shook his head. He was twelve, so grown up and mature. At only six years old, I lived in constant confusion, doubts gnawing at my stomach with thick precision.

  “She’s not teaching us anything. She’s just making us feel bad, telling lies about our family. Papa is not the enemy, little one.” Dima leaned down so that his eyes could look into mine, and those are the eyes I saw again today. They were clear and pure, free of malice. “Our enemy wears a uniform.” He stood back up, his eyes still locked on mine. “Don’t believe a word she says.”

  If only I had listened to him.

  Nina

  She feared nothing,

  Or so I thought.

  She was my mama.

  Nina sits on the curb next to her car, rolling a cigarette through her fingers. It’s been years since she quit smoking. She stopped the day she found out she was pregnant, suddenly acutely aware of how her actions might affect someone else. But now, for the first time in nearly eighteen years, she finds herself craving a cigarette. It’s as though the ghost of her past settled upon her the moment her mother started screeching. All the wondering and confusion she’d felt growing up as the daughter of Elizaveta Andreyevna Mishurova squeezes at her heart like a vice, and her hands tremble as she looks at the rolled tobacco in her hand.

  Her mother had never cared for the habit, which only fueled Nina’s desire to smoke as a young woman. Many nights, she lit up just before entering their small flat so that she could walk in the door and finish smoking inside, relishing the way Elizaveta’s mouth would tighten into one long, thin line. Perhaps she’d never really loved the habit of smoking, but rather the power it wielded over her mother.

  The door to the clinic opens behind her, and she stands as Viktor steps out. “Would you like to come in now?” he asks. Nina takes in a deep breath, then lets it out slowly, the air in her lungs feeling stifled and starched, tight like it’s being pushed through a narrow hole. She nods, and he holds out his arm toward the door. Nina drops the cigarette into her purse and offers him a wry grin.

  “I haven’t had one of those in a long time,” she says sheepishly. Viktor offers a gentle smile in return.

  “Well, as your doctor I can’t recommend that you have one, but...” he pauses and Nina stops in front of him, looking up into his dark eyes. “But as your friend, I can certainly empathize with the desire,” he says. Viktor’s voice has a low husk to it. Nina’s heartbeat quickens as she locks eyes with him.

  “Ahem.”

  They jump and turn to the tattooed receptionist who pokes her head out from behind the door that leads to the exam rooms. Viktor clears his throat and steps back so Nina can walk by.

  “Yes, Alexa?” he asks, strolling to the front desk.

  “The patient in Room 1 just yelled something at me in Russian. I’m not sure what she said, but she sounded pissed, so...”

  Viktor and Nina rush past her and push into Exam Room 1 where they find Elizaveta pacing back and forth from one wall to the next, muttering under her breath. When they walk in, she turns and plants her hands on her soft, wide hips. She’s readjusted her headscarf, tying it tightly under her chin. With her pinched, wrinkled face she looks like every stereotypical picture ever painted of the Russian babushka. Nina almost laughs, but is quickly sobered by the look in her mother’s eyes. It is a mixture of terror, anger, and fatigue.

  “Why would you leave me here?” she demands, her eyes not on V
iktor’s, but on Nina’s. “You leave me alone, and then send in the crazy girl with the drawings on her arms to check on me. You are trying to kill me!”

  “Mama,” Nina begins, taking a step forward. “I’m not trying to kill you. You weren’t alone that long.”

  Elizaveta holds up her hand, silencing Nina. “I don’t want to hear it,” she responds. “I would like to go home. I am tired, and I need to rest.”

  Nina glances at Viktor with raised eyebrows. He sits down on his swivel stool, his long legs stretching out in front of him. Crossing his arms over his chest, he looks at Elizaveta for a moment before speaking.

  “Elizaveta Andreyevna,” he says, “it has been a very long, hard morning for you. I’m concerned about you returning home right now. I’d really like to have a few more tests run to make sure that your health is strong.”

  “Psh,” Elizaveta interrupts. “I am fine. There is nothing wrong with my health. I’m only tired and want to go home.”

  Viktor takes in a long, deep breath and nods his head. “Absolutely, I understand,” he replies. “And you’re right, you do need some rest. How about this.” He sits up a little and slides his chair forward so that he’s sitting in front of her, their eyes almost level with one another. “How about you go to the hospital right now and let them run their tests. I will call ahead and make sure they understand you are an outpatient, which means they will not keep you overnight. If they need to run more tests you can return Monday after you’ve had a chance to rest.”

  Elizaveta shakes her head. “No. I will not go to the hospital. I go to the hospital and I die. I won’t die under the noses of incompetent American doctors.”

  Nina sighs. “Mama,” she says, but stops immediately when Elizaveta glares at her, the hurt in her eyes brimming bright in the very center.

  Viktor reaches out and grabs Elizaveta’s hand, covering it with both of his. She looks back at him and suddenly looks so small and frightened. Nina blinks hard against tears that prick at the corner of her eyes.